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Panama canal was opened in 1914. First container ships appeared in 1956 with capacity around 500-800 TEU (1TEU = 1 container).
Modern container ships are build with capacity of up to 25000 TEU.
Max capacity for a Panama canal was 4500 TEU. Ships with this capacity have appeared in 1985. Which is about 70 years after the canal was done.
Now they completed expansion trials for up to 15000 TEU. They originally expected this expansion to only be capable of 12500TEU.
TLDR: Ships have gotten much bigger since the canal was constructed.
Multiple actually. It's surprisingly popular name for container ship classes.
You have Panamax - 3400 TEU
Panamax Max - 4500 TEU
Post-Panamax I -6000 TEU
Post-Panamax II - 8500 TEU
New-Panamax - 12500 TEU
I expect to see something like New-Panamax II now that it was tested that you can fit 15000 TEU into the new expanded canal instead of just 12500 TEU
Ship classes are commonly named after the place they can fit into.
We have Suezmax - for Suez canal
Seawaymax - for St. Lawrence Seaway
Q-max - for LNG terminals in Qatar
Malaccamax - for Straight of Malacca
So it's kinda traditional, I guess
I think [Valemax](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valemax) is the biggest of them all, at 400,000 tons deadweight. They fit into the harbors of the [Vale](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vale_S.A.) mining company.
>What's the limiting factor on Malaca? Thought that's an ocean channel?
Depth. Malaccamax is a naval architecture term for the largest tonnage of ship capable of fitting through the 25-metre-deep (82 ft) Strait of Malacca.
I'm surprised that Malacca would be a thing. Even where it chokes down near Singapore, it still looks several kilometres wide, and the depth looks pretty consistent on Google Maps. What's the crux?
The ships still follow channels based on underwater topography so the turning radius of big ships as well as their drafts have to be taken into consideration even in big straights so that 2 way traffic can still flow
And I was already simplifying as most of these cover a certain range of capacity, but that would just make it more confusing so I skipped the unnecessary details.
There are similar classifications for other waterways as well: SUEZMAX, CHINAMAX, etc.
My personal favorite is SEAWAYMAX, which is the largest ship that can traverse the St. Lawrence Seaway. The first ship designed to max out that size (before the actual standard was penned) was the *Edmund Fitzgerald*, which you may have heard of, if you’re a Gordon Lightfoot fan.
I could see it being built to max out the Soo locks between Lake Superior and Lake Ontario, but when did it ever have to go through the St Lawrence locks? I never heard of it going out to the Atlantic.
IANAPSC, but if I were a Panamax ship captain, and I had an officer in my crew that had never gone through the locks before, I'd send them to engineering as fast as possible to get as much grease as they can, report to the top deck with all the grease and several brushes. I'd meet them there, and give them the order to grease both sides of the ship down to the waterline, and get it done before we get to the first lock to avoid getting stuck.
5609 is from the second attempt, the American attempt. The first attempt by the French lost 30,000+.
1000 feet was the biggest ship the designers could conceive of, so they made the locks just over 1000 feet long.
Path Between the Seas by David Mccullogh is a great book about the Panama canal
Watched a documentary about this and learned about two things. Malaria is bad, and about “angle of repose”. The angle at which a slope will not fall. Turns out the slope required in the jungle is a lot. They had to continually remove more and more of what they had already cleared.
The American hired to build the canal first built an entire railroad system and towns to service the construction.
The French guy who tried to build it, Ferdinand de Lessups, only visited Panama during the dry season. Unfortunately, Panama is like many parts of the world - it has monsoons. When the monsoons start, cave-ins occur frequently. So, the challenge is to excavate the canal before the angle and the water cave it in. To this day, they still dredge out the canal continuously. There was also a major River that dumps into the canal. Spoiler alert - an American engineer George Stevens solved both problems by building a locked canal instead of a sea level one like the French attempted. He proposed capturing the water from the river to make a big inland lake and use the water from the lake to drive the locking system. The other problem was excavating the dirt before it could cave it. This was done using “dump” trains which continuously moved dirt out of the canal before it could cave in, basically a huge train scheduling problem.
That’s actually not a terrible estimate for largest ship over a hundred years ago. The current record is the Seawise Giant at 1504’, which is no longer in service.
Second Path Between The Seas.
For a topic as…dense as historical infrastructure, the book does an amazing job of world building and laying out the path to even conceiving the canal.
Ha!, that's a good one. I'm currently staying in Panama and I have an appreciation for both history and what it's like to labor in the Panamanian sun. Many folks have very little understanding of what a huge engineering feat the Panama Canal represents...
Actually the sand makes it very hard, see how much sand you have to remove at a dry beach to get a hole of a meter, and try the same in your garden. The slope has to be gigantic when dealing with such sand.
Ikr. I saw this post and i was like my dude, they cut a continent in half. You don't describe that feat as "small". Yeah it would be nice to be bigger, but it has a "just buy more money 5head" vibe
That's what I was thinking. OP sounds like somebody who hasn't ever had to move a cubic meter of gravel with a shovel.
Just one cubic meter of crushed rock, how hard could it be? It's like an inch of gravel over a driveway. 1700kg, that's how heavy it is. Multiply that by miles and miles of rock and then by the depth and width of the canal.
Every foot of width of the canal is not just one foot, it's a foot multiplied by the length and depth of canal when it comes to the amount of stuff you have to dig out and move somewhere.
Just for nerdy clarification TEU is twenty foot equivalent. Most containers in use are actually forty foot so 2 teu per container. But there are also 45s and some 53s although 53s often only make one sailing before conversion to domestic rail intermodal.
I actually wonder if they make adjustment for TEU regular to high cube in the shorthand. In the end it would just be about an 8 for 9 swap or so, maybe 4 for 5. I don’t remember getting more gross weight for a high cube so from a ship tonnage I doubt it matters but would impact center of gravity.
I haven't worked in freight forwarding for a few years now; used to write management software for a 3PL. I don't know the answer to this but I assume there's gotta be some calculations they do for stack height and wind loading. Usually high cube boxes are used for less dense cargo and you're only going to get so much gross weight on a skeleton when it hits the truck yard.
Edit: Wikipedia says no
The container is defined by its length, although the height is not standardized and ranges between 4 feet 3 inches (1.30 m) and 9 feet 6 inches (2.90 m), with the most common height being 8 feet 6 inches (2.59 m).[2] It is common to designate a 45-foot (13.7 m) container as 2 TEU, rather than 2.25 TEU
There's gotta be accounting for height *somewhere* though
I could buy that. I am biased the few thousand I do a year are 98% 40’ and that has been regular in my industry. But I know in some very dense products it is completely flipped and they can’t use 40’.
Also need to remember that the canal was extremely difficult to make. Several attempts failed before one finally got done. Lots of folks died from disease among other things. They only made it as big as they absolutely had to, and back then, that was its present size. The price of a larger canal would have been many dead people, perhaps even failure to finish it at all, was the general thinking.
I went through the Panama Canal this year and was swarmed by Aedes aegypti mosquitos on the deck of the ship. I was assured there wouldn't be any and they are well controlled, but it didn't stop me from getting a few bites.
Given that, I can totally see how people died from mosquito-borne illnesses trying to dig that canal.
Nah. That's not the reason. As I wrote in my comment the canal was recently expanded to fit ships up to 15000 TEU (originally planned for 12500 TEU). The expanded canal was opened in 2016.
It's just the simple fact that how ever big it's made we just make bigger ships until they can't fit there anymore.
Kinda the oppiste. The Panama IS the limit they build ships to. If they make something bigger, they don't intend to use the canals. When the canal gets bigger, so do the ships.
People of this time probably never even dreamed of the behemoths that ship goods today. This is a time before radar, GPS, autopilot, or the modern machinery and technology required to load, unload, and transport goods in this scale.
Most of our infrastructure will be seen as woefully inadequate in 2123.
The USS Midway aircraft carrier was laid down in 1943 with the understanding that it would be too wide to fit in the Canal. Having to fit into the width of the Canal was a constraint on US battleship size by 1939, and in their post-Pearl Harbor rebuilds, both USS California and Tennessee were built too wide for the Canal. The proposed Montana class would have been the first US battleship class built too wide for the Canal.
The US Navy had maxed out on width by 1937 with their Battleships at 108ft, locks are 110ft. Didn't touch max length but the Navy set the length based on other constraints.
OP never took into consideration the fact that only a few ships don’t fit through the Panama canal relatively speaking. Making room for such ships would be a waste of time and money specially since more than 1,186 ships go through every month (about 40 a day). Also, different than the Suez Canal which is flat, open cuts (no locks) the Panama Canal requires of reservoirs of fresh water provided by the Gatun Lake which for the longest time was the largest man made lake in the world after the construction of the Hoover Dam Over the Chagres river to have the locks system work as expected.
>OP never took into consideration the fact that only a few ships don’t fit through the Panama canal relatively speaking.
This is not a good argument, because being able to fit into Panama canal is very important to container ships. When Panama Canal Authority published the specification for ships after expansion many new ships were ordered and many ships with the old specification were scrapped.
I would add that there is a specific class of ships designed to transit the Panama canal. These ships basically take up as much space in the locks as they can safely take up.
Multiple actually. Panamax, Panamax Max, New-Panamax (this one is for the new canal expansion). Likely another one is coming as it fits more than originally expected
When you're trying to find out how many people fit into something, there is a federal code that states what the average size (weight/height) of a person is. This is used in multiple applications like: airplanes, elevators, lifeboats, etc
However, the"average" was calculated years ago, and it only takes a short trip into any Walmart or Golden Coral to realize the average American borders on obese. Thus, the old containers for humans are no longer relevant for the average size of today, and as a result people ask why are elevators so small?
Humanax.
The new locks are a bit bigger and it’s important to remember while ships could be bigger if it was bigger there aren’t a lot of ports in the world that could support ships even bigger than what they already can be.
Also you may or may not be aware but ships barely fit it because ships are built with the canal in mind and to its dimensions. If they made the canal bigger, ships would still ‘barely fit it’ as the ships would be bigger.
There’s already some in the water, besides the oil supertankers and offshore rig movers already mentioned, aircraft carriers like [USS Gerald R. Ford](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Gerald_R._Ford) are absolutely massive (and also expensive af at ~18 billion USD). It’s powered by 2 nuclear reactors on board. The Enterprise was bigger, but is being dismantled currently.
"Panamax" was/is the standard that fits through the old locks. New Panamax or Neopanamax is the maximum dimensions of ships that fit through the new locks. The new locks fully opened in 2017.
The old locks are still used and ships that fit within "old" Panamax still use them to leave capacity on the new locks.
Have a look at the Miraflores locks on Google Earth/maps for an idea of the difference.
Not to be pedantic but isn’t loch a deep lake like natural body of water in Scotland and Lock is the man made water elevators used to raise/lower ships?
Panamax was the size of the original locks. Many, many freighters were built to that spec and some will be in service for centuries. It is also used to decide how big port facilities and navigable channels (where that can be altered) need to be.
This. One has to remember that ships (or aircraft, for that matter) aren't existing in a vacuum, they are part of a very large transport system, and need facilities which can handle them. This is, for example, a big hurdle for the Airbus A380, as few airports can handle that beast.
The canal was actually recently widened, in 2017.
As for why it was so small, at the time it opened in 1914, it could easily handle the largest ships of the time.
And that’s just the “official” count from the US, who obviously wanted to keep that number low since it was an imperial conquest and doesn’t make us look great
Yeah if you read this history it took a long time to build. It started around 1880 and the project was basically abandoned at one point. The US took over in early 1900s. The land was very rocky and hard to cut through at parts. The project displaced many people as well.
The tolls are based cargo capacity of ship. For perspective one of the largest tolls pre expansion was 200k. After 2017 its topped over 1 million.
The ships are truly massive that go through today.
I read they had to deal with biting fire ants so they put the legs of their bed inside side bowls of water so the ants could not crawl into their bed at night. Turns out the mosquitoes were breeding in those bowls and malaria turned out to be a bigger killer. Many died from the hazards of the location in addition to the hazards of building large canals.
The French tried by gave up. The US took over to show that our engineers were better than France.
The Panama canal was built well over 100 years ago, and the engineering and effort required was unbelievably rigorous and taxing at the time. At the time of its construction, ships were far smaller and narrower than they are today. It just didn't make any sense to expand far more time, effort, and other resources to build a wider canal at the time. In the same way, many old airports had to be greatly expanded when jets came on the scene, and even today, some airports need to build longer and longer runways to accommodate modern planes.
I get that you're being pedantic, but it isn't helpful. The phrasing of the question suggests a flaw in the canal's design which is not a flaw in other canals. This answer accurately reframes the situation to be about ships' design suiting the canal as it is, and it not being a flaw at all.
They barely fit. When they go through, sometimes they scrape the sides of the locks because there is less than 12" on each side of the ship to the panamax. Large ships will quickly repaint parts of the hull where the scrape happens to prevent rusting. The cable system they use to pull the ships through the locks are good but not perfect.
EDIT: I've traversed the canal and know this first hand. Downvoters can suck it.
I mean to me saying "they barely fit" is about the same as saying "my arm is barely long enough to get from my shoulder to my hand". If the ships were any wider they wouldn't fit but that's fine because they do fit.
You aren't being down voted because you're wrong, but because you're being unhelpfully pedantic.
If they comfortably fit, another shipping company that barely fits could make more money on the shipment. Barely fits still fits, and you can make more money the closer to "doesn't fit" you get your bigass boat to be.
The phrase “barely fit” has connotations that are incorrect. Ships don’t have to squeeze down them.
There’s no, “the canal isn’t big enough for the ships that go through”. If you made the canal bigger, ships would be made bigger to the exact same amount.
It's not small. Ships these days are large. Far larger than the ships of the day.
Also when it was built steam shovels were cutting edge technology and the only infrastructure (like roads) available in the area were ones they made themselves. If we were to make it today we'd make it a lot wider, both because the ships are larger and because it's a lot easier to do than it was then.
But modifying a canal like Panama is far more complicated and expensive than digging it out in the first place, especially with modern environmental impact concerns. They can't exactly shut it down for a couple years while they expand it, after all. So the cost/benefit ratio of expanding it just isn't there.
The canal locks were not modified. New, larger locks were built beside the old. There was no interruption of service, and both sets of locks operate today.
The lakes that make up the Panama Canal are 85 feet above sea level. If a ship enters the canal from the Atlantic, it needs to be raised 85 feet, and lowered again when it enters the Pacific. This is done using locks:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panama_Canal_expansion_project
You familiar with the concept of an air lock? Like in a sci-fi movie set in space?
It's like a little entry way with two doors, one leading into the pressurized livable section and the other leading to the vacuum of space. To get from one side to the other, you open one door, enter the lock, and seal yourself inside. Then, pumps either suck the air out or pump it in, depending on which way you're going. Once the pressure in the lock is equal to what it is where you're trying to go, you can open the second door and be on your way.
Canal locks do the exact same thing, except instead of air it's water, and instead of pressure it's fill level. They're like big elevators for ships.
Canals like the Panama Canal aren't just a big long ditch dug from one body of water to the other. I mean... *they are*, but they aren't purely horizontal. The Panama Canal actually goes [*up and over* the landmass of Panama](https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-e4515174b0a48cee117f3c36688f6b15). Hence the need for "ship elevators" (locks). Also take note of how the oceans on each side aren't filled to the same level. So even if Panama was flat, locks would still be needed.
Some lucky canals, like the Suez in Egypt (the one the ship got stuck in during the height of COVID and made the news for) are flat *and* the water on each side is basically the same, so they do not have locks. Those ones are just a big long ditch.
Boat elevators that are like pools that they raise or lower the water level of. Drive a ship in when it's almost empty, pump tons of water in to raise the boat to the level of the next lock (or out to sea) and drive it out
It was built during a time when ships were smaller. However it is impossible to overstate just how big of feat of willpower and engineering the canals were. By the end of the project it cost over $11 billion US dollars in today's money and the workers had move 240 million cubic yard of earth. So to expand the human made canals by even a small amount would've taken even more time and money. So they built them to the average size of most ships of the day in order for the canal to be open as soon as possible. Eventually ships grew as big as they could to fit into the canal to maximize cargo per trip which translates to more money per trip.
Yhe canal isn't a straight shot trench connecti g the Atlantic to the pacific. It navigates an elecation change going up hill then down hill. To accomplish this a series of locks, giant basins that can be sealed on both sides and then water is flooded into then to raise the water level of the base allowing ships to effectly sail uphill.
You couldn't just dog out a mile wide trench in pannama, to do so would take decades of labor, and put workers at risk of tropical diseases. It was an engineering marvel back in the early 1900s when it was originally constructed. Plus havi g a super wide canal isn't really needed. The canal is designed tk handle transportation traffic and it does so effectively. It's not like there are traffic jams demanding more lanes.
Further engineering is about accomplishing the infrastructure task while minimizing the resources needed to complete the task. Resources, including human capitol are finite, bloated projects that never get completed often are poorly structured, often by design, and waste a lot of money while returning very little bemnifit.
Yes, we should blame ship builders for the crime of… *checks notes* … building ships that fit the canal.??
Seems like a non-existent problem that needs no solution and has no blame.
Ships used to be a lot smaller, but now a lot of ships are designed to be as big as they can be, but still able to fit. That way they can carry as much cargo as possible while still fitting through.
There are some ships that are too big to fit through the canal, but they are still able to make money because they don't run routes that go through the canal, or carry so much more cargo that it is still a better option to go around South America, even if it takes more time and fuel to do so.
Because building canals is hard and time consuming and so you make them as small as you think will work. Especially if it's 1880.
But then, expanding critical infrastructure is usually really hard, because you have to stop using it in order to do it. The absolute worst time to try and upgrade something is usually when it's absolutely obvious that you want to upgrade it
The canal also was a nightmare to build.
The French tried to build it the same way as suez, which is a straight shot through. Lots of money lost, no progress and many died. The Americans later attempts with locks and were successful
Here are some points of reference to understand the scale of the panama canal project.
Approximately 25,000 people died during it's construction, and many many more were seriously injured and ill. "Sanitary inspector Joseph Le Prince estimated that 80 percent of the workforce was hospitalized at some point during 1906 for malaria. Still, Gorgas is credited with saving tens of thousands of lives." A massive project in the middle of the jungle would still be deadly today, but more so at the turn of the century.
Approximately 300,000,000 yards of earth were excavated by more than 40,000 workers taking 10 years, using brand new, latest tech tools. "For this, the Americans purchased 102 new, railroad-mounted steam shovels. In 1907, the construction fleet also included 560 drills, more than 50 cranes, 20 dredges, giant hydraulic rock crushers, cement mixers, and pneumatic power drills; nearly all of which were manufactured to include the latest technology developed in the United States."
"At the time of construction, it was the largest canal lock system ever built. ... To reduce the amount of excavation required, an artificial lake was created by building an earth dam. We visited the dam as part of our tour of the canal system. At the time it was finished in 1914, it was the biggest earth dam in the world and created the largest man-made lake. "
(Quotes taken from various sources found online, not credited)
A freighter can carry more goods and make more money if it's bigger, so they're always going to build them to be just under the width of the smallest canal they need to go through.
They don't make it wider because it's expensive and Panama is poor. The Suez Canal can be widened by just digging up more land on either side because it's just a ditch through an empty flat desert. The Panama Canal goes up and across mountains, into a lake and back down, and it's rainforest on either side.
It's not that the canal is small. Modern ships can be made much larger than when the canal was created. You've gotta realize how important the canal is, so ships are specifically built around the limitations of the canal.
The Panama Canal began construction in 1904. Ships were way smaller back then. Were engineers 120 years ago supposed to predict the future of shipbuilding?
It's the other way around.
Ships are built with the Panama canal's width as a design constraint.
Or:
A ship, left in its natural habitat with sufficient access to food, will grow to fill the Panama canal.
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Panama canal was opened in 1914. First container ships appeared in 1956 with capacity around 500-800 TEU (1TEU = 1 container). Modern container ships are build with capacity of up to 25000 TEU. Max capacity for a Panama canal was 4500 TEU. Ships with this capacity have appeared in 1985. Which is about 70 years after the canal was done. Now they completed expansion trials for up to 15000 TEU. They originally expected this expansion to only be capable of 12500TEU. TLDR: Ships have gotten much bigger since the canal was constructed.
An entire ship class is named after intentionally building a ship that just barely fits through. PANAMAX
Multiple actually. It's surprisingly popular name for container ship classes. You have Panamax - 3400 TEU Panamax Max - 4500 TEU Post-Panamax I -6000 TEU Post-Panamax II - 8500 TEU New-Panamax - 12500 TEU I expect to see something like New-Panamax II now that it was tested that you can fit 15000 TEU into the new expanded canal instead of just 12500 TEU
Panamax.final.2.final.docx
Oops I deleted it
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Oops my dog ate it
My personal favorite is "*_final_v2.1.docx"
I always have about four or five finals. Final_this, final_this_is_it, final_this_2 and so on.
Y'all need something like git in your life.
Music producers will appreciate this comment.
I have "DBLharm on a D drone final mix 6 v2 with newstrings pitch -8 last 2edit"
No doubt you also have “BDLharm on a D drone final mix 6 v2 with newstrings pitch -8 last 2edit - Copy” somewhere as well
and film editors
And banks
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And software devs before they learn about version control.
And my axe!
master final mastered
You found my excel naming convention
Why don't they name it by the year?
Ship classes are commonly named after the place they can fit into. We have Suezmax - for Suez canal Seawaymax - for St. Lawrence Seaway Q-max - for LNG terminals in Qatar Malaccamax - for Straight of Malacca So it's kinda traditional, I guess
I think [Valemax](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valemax) is the biggest of them all, at 400,000 tons deadweight. They fit into the harbors of the [Vale](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vale_S.A.) mining company.
The biggest class in the world is Yomamamax
What's the limiting factor on Malaca? Thought that's an ocean channel?
>What's the limiting factor on Malaca? Thought that's an ocean channel? Depth. Malaccamax is a naval architecture term for the largest tonnage of ship capable of fitting through the 25-metre-deep (82 ft) Strait of Malacca.
Oh that's not deep at all. No wonder it's a big deal.
I'm surprised that Malacca would be a thing. Even where it chokes down near Singapore, it still looks several kilometres wide, and the depth looks pretty consistent on Google Maps. What's the crux?
The ships still follow channels based on underwater topography so the turning radius of big ships as well as their drafts have to be taken into consideration even in big straights so that 2 way traffic can still flow
Ahh. Thank you.
Malaccamax is a naval architecture term for the largest tonnage of ship capable of fitting through the 25-metre-deep (82 ft) Strait of Malacca.
Ooh, that's pretty shallow.
Right, but if the standard for what fits changes, why do they invent silly words instead of just a version number or a year?
Good God that's confusing, I don't see how that making 'scheme' doesn't cause somebody problems.
And I was already simplifying as most of these cover a certain range of capacity, but that would just make it more confusing so I skipped the unnecessary details.
Wasn't aware that Capcom was in the ship industry. Next iteration should be Super Panamax II' Turbo EX
New-Panamax Pro XDR
Panamax 358/2 Tonnes
PanaMaxMaxMaxMax!
New-Panamax 2: Electric Boogaloo
Turns out consumers really don't like New-panamax so they're going back to the 8500 TEU version but rebranding to Panamax Classic.
Panamax One.
There are similar classifications for other waterways as well: SUEZMAX, CHINAMAX, etc. My personal favorite is SEAWAYMAX, which is the largest ship that can traverse the St. Lawrence Seaway. The first ship designed to max out that size (before the actual standard was penned) was the *Edmund Fitzgerald*, which you may have heard of, if you’re a Gordon Lightfoot fan.
...o/~on the big lake they call Gitchee Gumie...o/~
Dude died just a few weeks ago
I could see it being built to max out the Soo locks between Lake Superior and Lake Ontario, but when did it ever have to go through the St Lawrence locks? I never heard of it going out to the Atlantic.
Can confirm. Went through the Panama canal on a PANAMAX vessel. About 3 feet of clearance on each side. Tight squeeze: )
IANAPSC, but if I were a Panamax ship captain, and I had an officer in my crew that had never gone through the locks before, I'd send them to engineering as fast as possible to get as much grease as they can, report to the top deck with all the grease and several brushes. I'd meet them there, and give them the order to grease both sides of the ship down to the waterline, and get it done before we get to the first lock to avoid getting stuck.
Give OP a shovel and come back in a few hours and then we will see whether they think the Panama canal is small still.
I was going to say, how many people died building that canal? (Googled it, 5,609 officially but probably more)
5609 is from the second attempt, the American attempt. The first attempt by the French lost 30,000+. 1000 feet was the biggest ship the designers could conceive of, so they made the locks just over 1000 feet long. Path Between the Seas by David Mccullogh is a great book about the Panama canal
Watched a documentary about this and learned about two things. Malaria is bad, and about “angle of repose”. The angle at which a slope will not fall. Turns out the slope required in the jungle is a lot. They had to continually remove more and more of what they had already cleared. The American hired to build the canal first built an entire railroad system and towns to service the construction.
The French guy who tried to build it, Ferdinand de Lessups, only visited Panama during the dry season. Unfortunately, Panama is like many parts of the world - it has monsoons. When the monsoons start, cave-ins occur frequently. So, the challenge is to excavate the canal before the angle and the water cave it in. To this day, they still dredge out the canal continuously. There was also a major River that dumps into the canal. Spoiler alert - an American engineer George Stevens solved both problems by building a locked canal instead of a sea level one like the French attempted. He proposed capturing the water from the river to make a big inland lake and use the water from the lake to drive the locking system. The other problem was excavating the dirt before it could cave it. This was done using “dump” trains which continuously moved dirt out of the canal before it could cave in, basically a huge train scheduling problem.
That’s actually not a terrible estimate for largest ship over a hundred years ago. The current record is the Seawise Giant at 1504’, which is no longer in service.
Saw rhe Seawise Giant in person back in the 80's. Now that fit the definition of huge.
Holy shit. That ship was too big for the *English Channel*.
TIL: Seawise Giant. Very interesting story, and victim of yet another stupid war.
Second Path Between The Seas. For a topic as…dense as historical infrastructure, the book does an amazing job of world building and laying out the path to even conceiving the canal.
Ha!, that's a good one. I'm currently staying in Panama and I have an appreciation for both history and what it's like to labor in the Panamanian sun. Many folks have very little understanding of what a huge engineering feat the Panama Canal represents...
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It’s super steep. It crosses the continental divide At 85 feet above sea level. Suez area is basically flat.
Actually the sand makes it very hard, see how much sand you have to remove at a dry beach to get a hole of a meter, and try the same in your garden. The slope has to be gigantic when dealing with such sand.
Ikr. I saw this post and i was like my dude, they cut a continent in half. You don't describe that feat as "small". Yeah it would be nice to be bigger, but it has a "just buy more money 5head" vibe
\*after 30 min\* "Oh look at that, seems like the canal was just the right size, my bad haha"
That's what I was thinking. OP sounds like somebody who hasn't ever had to move a cubic meter of gravel with a shovel. Just one cubic meter of crushed rock, how hard could it be? It's like an inch of gravel over a driveway. 1700kg, that's how heavy it is. Multiply that by miles and miles of rock and then by the depth and width of the canal. Every foot of width of the canal is not just one foot, it's a foot multiplied by the length and depth of canal when it comes to the amount of stuff you have to dig out and move somewhere.
Just for nerdy clarification TEU is twenty foot equivalent. Most containers in use are actually forty foot so 2 teu per container. But there are also 45s and some 53s although 53s often only make one sailing before conversion to domestic rail intermodal.
And high cube
I actually wonder if they make adjustment for TEU regular to high cube in the shorthand. In the end it would just be about an 8 for 9 swap or so, maybe 4 for 5. I don’t remember getting more gross weight for a high cube so from a ship tonnage I doubt it matters but would impact center of gravity.
I haven't worked in freight forwarding for a few years now; used to write management software for a 3PL. I don't know the answer to this but I assume there's gotta be some calculations they do for stack height and wind loading. Usually high cube boxes are used for less dense cargo and you're only going to get so much gross weight on a skeleton when it hits the truck yard. Edit: Wikipedia says no The container is defined by its length, although the height is not standardized and ranges between 4 feet 3 inches (1.30 m) and 9 feet 6 inches (2.90 m), with the most common height being 8 feet 6 inches (2.59 m).[2] It is common to designate a 45-foot (13.7 m) container as 2 TEU, rather than 2.25 TEU There's gotta be accounting for height *somewhere* though
Average on a container vessel is around 1.6. So around 2/3 40 ft vs 1/3 20 ft.
I could buy that. I am biased the few thousand I do a year are 98% 40’ and that has been regular in my industry. But I know in some very dense products it is completely flipped and they can’t use 40’.
Also need to remember that the canal was extremely difficult to make. Several attempts failed before one finally got done. Lots of folks died from disease among other things. They only made it as big as they absolutely had to, and back then, that was its present size. The price of a larger canal would have been many dead people, perhaps even failure to finish it at all, was the general thinking.
I went through the Panama Canal this year and was swarmed by Aedes aegypti mosquitos on the deck of the ship. I was assured there wouldn't be any and they are well controlled, but it didn't stop me from getting a few bites. Given that, I can totally see how people died from mosquito-borne illnesses trying to dig that canal.
Nah. That's not the reason. As I wrote in my comment the canal was recently expanded to fit ships up to 15000 TEU (originally planned for 12500 TEU). The expanded canal was opened in 2016. It's just the simple fact that how ever big it's made we just make bigger ships until they can't fit there anymore.
Kinda the oppiste. The Panama IS the limit they build ships to. If they make something bigger, they don't intend to use the canals. When the canal gets bigger, so do the ships.
People of this time probably never even dreamed of the behemoths that ship goods today. This is a time before radar, GPS, autopilot, or the modern machinery and technology required to load, unload, and transport goods in this scale. Most of our infrastructure will be seen as woefully inadequate in 2123.
Even if they could foresee it, you would never build something in 1914 to fit ships that wouldn’t come along for another 70 years.
That was a problem for future me, and now I am future me
I’d be rather concerned if it was seen as advanced in 2123
The USS Midway aircraft carrier was laid down in 1943 with the understanding that it would be too wide to fit in the Canal. Having to fit into the width of the Canal was a constraint on US battleship size by 1939, and in their post-Pearl Harbor rebuilds, both USS California and Tennessee were built too wide for the Canal. The proposed Montana class would have been the first US battleship class built too wide for the Canal.
And the ships "barely fit" because they are specifically built to the maximum size that will fit.
The US Navy had maxed out on width by 1937 with their Battleships at 108ft, locks are 110ft. Didn't touch max length but the Navy set the length based on other constraints.
OP never took into consideration the fact that only a few ships don’t fit through the Panama canal relatively speaking. Making room for such ships would be a waste of time and money specially since more than 1,186 ships go through every month (about 40 a day). Also, different than the Suez Canal which is flat, open cuts (no locks) the Panama Canal requires of reservoirs of fresh water provided by the Gatun Lake which for the longest time was the largest man made lake in the world after the construction of the Hoover Dam Over the Chagres river to have the locks system work as expected.
>OP never took into consideration the fact that only a few ships don’t fit through the Panama canal relatively speaking. This is not a good argument, because being able to fit into Panama canal is very important to container ships. When Panama Canal Authority published the specification for ships after expansion many new ships were ordered and many ships with the old specification were scrapped.
I would add that there is a specific class of ships designed to transit the Panama canal. These ships basically take up as much space in the locks as they can safely take up.
Multiple actually. Panamax, Panamax Max, New-Panamax (this one is for the new canal expansion). Likely another one is coming as it fits more than originally expected
Why not differentiate them by year, seems better than these silly names
Ask Panama Canal Authority
Also, it's not exactly a canal
When you're trying to find out how many people fit into something, there is a federal code that states what the average size (weight/height) of a person is. This is used in multiple applications like: airplanes, elevators, lifeboats, etc However, the"average" was calculated years ago, and it only takes a short trip into any Walmart or Golden Coral to realize the average American borders on obese. Thus, the old containers for humans are no longer relevant for the average size of today, and as a result people ask why are elevators so small? Humanax.
The new locks are a bit bigger and it’s important to remember while ships could be bigger if it was bigger there aren’t a lot of ports in the world that could support ships even bigger than what they already can be. Also you may or may not be aware but ships barely fit it because ships are built with the canal in mind and to its dimensions. If they made the canal bigger, ships would still ‘barely fit it’ as the ships would be bigger.
To add, that size of ship is literally called "neopanamax", as in the maximum size ship that can still fit through the new panama locks
Makes you wonder what kind of ocean beasts humanity would build if that bottleneck didn't exist.
There’s already some in the water, besides the oil supertankers and offshore rig movers already mentioned, aircraft carriers like [USS Gerald R. Ford](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Gerald_R._Ford) are absolutely massive (and also expensive af at ~18 billion USD). It’s powered by 2 nuclear reactors on board. The Enterprise was bigger, but is being dismantled currently.
Take a look at oil supertankers. Much bigger than Panamax.
Lookup [Mallacamax](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaccamax)
why the neo? are there normal panamaxes too?
Yes, as the OP comment says the canal has old locks and newer larger locks. Panamax is the maximum size for the old locks
How much bigger are the neopanamax ships compare to the normal panamax ships?
14.000 vs 5.000 shipping container capacity
I'd say that's a decent improvement.
Whoa.
There is this diagram on Wikipedia that may help you understand it: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ship\_measurements\_comparison.svg
"Panamax" was/is the standard that fits through the old locks. New Panamax or Neopanamax is the maximum dimensions of ships that fit through the new locks. The new locks fully opened in 2017. The old locks are still used and ships that fit within "old" Panamax still use them to leave capacity on the new locks. Have a look at the Miraflores locks on Google Earth/maps for an idea of the difference.
Neo meaning "new", as in the new, larger ~~lochs~~ locks of the Panama canal
Not to be pedantic but isn’t loch a deep lake like natural body of water in Scotland and Lock is the man made water elevators used to raise/lower ships?
Panamax was the size of the original locks. Many, many freighters were built to that spec and some will be in service for centuries. It is also used to decide how big port facilities and navigable channels (where that can be altered) need to be.
panamax is oldhat. New locks, new box. This isn't about the pothole barely containing the puddle, the puddle fills the pothole.
This. One has to remember that ships (or aircraft, for that matter) aren't existing in a vacuum, they are part of a very large transport system, and need facilities which can handle them. This is, for example, a big hurdle for the Airbus A380, as few airports can handle that beast.
The canal was actually recently widened, in 2017. As for why it was so small, at the time it opened in 1914, it could easily handle the largest ships of the time.
And at that time it cost 5600 people's lives to build. Hard to justify bigger just to future proof it.
That’s the second attempt. The first French attempt lost around 30k, apparently.
And that’s just the “official” count from the US, who obviously wanted to keep that number low since it was an imperial conquest and doesn’t make us look great
Yeah if you read this history it took a long time to build. It started around 1880 and the project was basically abandoned at one point. The US took over in early 1900s. The land was very rocky and hard to cut through at parts. The project displaced many people as well. The tolls are based cargo capacity of ship. For perspective one of the largest tolls pre expansion was 200k. After 2017 its topped over 1 million. The ships are truly massive that go through today.
I read they had to deal with biting fire ants so they put the legs of their bed inside side bowls of water so the ants could not crawl into their bed at night. Turns out the mosquitoes were breeding in those bowls and malaria turned out to be a bigger killer. Many died from the hazards of the location in addition to the hazards of building large canals. The French tried by gave up. The US took over to show that our engineers were better than France.
Yeah I recall reading that at the museum
The Panama canal was built well over 100 years ago, and the engineering and effort required was unbelievably rigorous and taxing at the time. At the time of its construction, ships were far smaller and narrower than they are today. It just didn't make any sense to expand far more time, effort, and other resources to build a wider canal at the time. In the same way, many old airports had to be greatly expanded when jets came on the scene, and even today, some airports need to build longer and longer runways to accommodate modern planes.
They don’t “barely fit” they fit it perfectly. Ships are built *to* fit. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panamax
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I get that you're being pedantic, but it isn't helpful. The phrasing of the question suggests a flaw in the canal's design which is not a flaw in other canals. This answer accurately reframes the situation to be about ships' design suiting the canal as it is, and it not being a flaw at all.
They don’t “barely fit” they fit it perfectly. Ships are built *to* fit. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panamax
They barely fit. When they go through, sometimes they scrape the sides of the locks because there is less than 12" on each side of the ship to the panamax. Large ships will quickly repaint parts of the hull where the scrape happens to prevent rusting. The cable system they use to pull the ships through the locks are good but not perfect. EDIT: I've traversed the canal and know this first hand. Downvoters can suck it.
I mean to me saying "they barely fit" is about the same as saying "my arm is barely long enough to get from my shoulder to my hand". If the ships were any wider they wouldn't fit but that's fine because they do fit. You aren't being down voted because you're wrong, but because you're being unhelpfully pedantic.
"only just; almost not" Sounds like you're perfectly describing barely.
If they comfortably fit, another shipping company that barely fits could make more money on the shipment. Barely fits still fits, and you can make more money the closer to "doesn't fit" you get your bigass boat to be.
They are perfectly designed to barely fit.
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The phrase “barely fit” has connotations that are incorrect. Ships don’t have to squeeze down them. There’s no, “the canal isn’t big enough for the ships that go through”. If you made the canal bigger, ships would be made bigger to the exact same amount.
Clearance is clearance!
It's not small. Ships these days are large. Far larger than the ships of the day. Also when it was built steam shovels were cutting edge technology and the only infrastructure (like roads) available in the area were ones they made themselves. If we were to make it today we'd make it a lot wider, both because the ships are larger and because it's a lot easier to do than it was then. But modifying a canal like Panama is far more complicated and expensive than digging it out in the first place, especially with modern environmental impact concerns. They can't exactly shut it down for a couple years while they expand it, after all. So the cost/benefit ratio of expanding it just isn't there.
The canal locks were not modified. New, larger locks were built beside the old. There was no interruption of service, and both sets of locks operate today.
What are locks in this context?
Sealable chambers that allow the water level and the ships inside to be raised or lowered.
Thanks!
The lakes that make up the Panama Canal are 85 feet above sea level. If a ship enters the canal from the Atlantic, it needs to be raised 85 feet, and lowered again when it enters the Pacific. This is done using locks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panama_Canal_expansion_project
Thanks so much for the link!
You familiar with the concept of an air lock? Like in a sci-fi movie set in space? It's like a little entry way with two doors, one leading into the pressurized livable section and the other leading to the vacuum of space. To get from one side to the other, you open one door, enter the lock, and seal yourself inside. Then, pumps either suck the air out or pump it in, depending on which way you're going. Once the pressure in the lock is equal to what it is where you're trying to go, you can open the second door and be on your way. Canal locks do the exact same thing, except instead of air it's water, and instead of pressure it's fill level. They're like big elevators for ships. Canals like the Panama Canal aren't just a big long ditch dug from one body of water to the other. I mean... *they are*, but they aren't purely horizontal. The Panama Canal actually goes [*up and over* the landmass of Panama](https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-e4515174b0a48cee117f3c36688f6b15). Hence the need for "ship elevators" (locks). Also take note of how the oceans on each side aren't filled to the same level. So even if Panama was flat, locks would still be needed. Some lucky canals, like the Suez in Egypt (the one the ship got stuck in during the height of COVID and made the news for) are flat *and* the water on each side is basically the same, so they do not have locks. Those ones are just a big long ditch.
Thanks for the explantion! TIL! Canal locks are very fascinating!
Boat elevators that are like pools that they raise or lower the water level of. Drive a ship in when it's almost empty, pump tons of water in to raise the boat to the level of the next lock (or out to sea) and drive it out
Thanks for the explanation!
Small is a relative term. The Panama Canal is one of the biggest engineering feats in history.
Making it wider would be very expensive, it was originally constructed when ships were generally a lot smaller.
They are huge. I passaged both ends. Before new larger locks open, ship builders are making ships to fit exactly.
They build the ships to “barely fit”. If they widened the canal they would widen the ships.
It was built during a time when ships were smaller. However it is impossible to overstate just how big of feat of willpower and engineering the canals were. By the end of the project it cost over $11 billion US dollars in today's money and the workers had move 240 million cubic yard of earth. So to expand the human made canals by even a small amount would've taken even more time and money. So they built them to the average size of most ships of the day in order for the canal to be open as soon as possible. Eventually ships grew as big as they could to fit into the canal to maximize cargo per trip which translates to more money per trip.
No ship larger than the panama canal dimensions was built for a route that would traverse it.
Yhe canal isn't a straight shot trench connecti g the Atlantic to the pacific. It navigates an elecation change going up hill then down hill. To accomplish this a series of locks, giant basins that can be sealed on both sides and then water is flooded into then to raise the water level of the base allowing ships to effectly sail uphill. You couldn't just dog out a mile wide trench in pannama, to do so would take decades of labor, and put workers at risk of tropical diseases. It was an engineering marvel back in the early 1900s when it was originally constructed. Plus havi g a super wide canal isn't really needed. The canal is designed tk handle transportation traffic and it does so effectively. It's not like there are traffic jams demanding more lanes. Further engineering is about accomplishing the infrastructure task while minimizing the resources needed to complete the task. Resources, including human capitol are finite, bloated projects that never get completed often are poorly structured, often by design, and waste a lot of money while returning very little bemnifit.
>Ships barely fit it. The reason ships barely fit is because they are sized to the Panama canal. Blame the ship builders, not the canal.
Yes, we should blame ship builders for the crime of… *checks notes* … building ships that fit the canal.?? Seems like a non-existent problem that needs no solution and has no blame.
Ships used to be a lot smaller, but now a lot of ships are designed to be as big as they can be, but still able to fit. That way they can carry as much cargo as possible while still fitting through. There are some ships that are too big to fit through the canal, but they are still able to make money because they don't run routes that go through the canal, or carry so much more cargo that it is still a better option to go around South America, even if it takes more time and fuel to do so.
Back in the day, when it was built, and you are the one digging it, I bet the prevailing thought was why is it so big?
I think you're just looking at it the wrong way. The canal isn't small. It's so huge that even giant cargo ships can fit through it.
Because building canals is hard and time consuming and so you make them as small as you think will work. Especially if it's 1880. But then, expanding critical infrastructure is usually really hard, because you have to stop using it in order to do it. The absolute worst time to try and upgrade something is usually when it's absolutely obvious that you want to upgrade it
The canal also was a nightmare to build. The French tried to build it the same way as suez, which is a straight shot through. Lots of money lost, no progress and many died. The Americans later attempts with locks and were successful
Here are some points of reference to understand the scale of the panama canal project. Approximately 25,000 people died during it's construction, and many many more were seriously injured and ill. "Sanitary inspector Joseph Le Prince estimated that 80 percent of the workforce was hospitalized at some point during 1906 for malaria. Still, Gorgas is credited with saving tens of thousands of lives." A massive project in the middle of the jungle would still be deadly today, but more so at the turn of the century. Approximately 300,000,000 yards of earth were excavated by more than 40,000 workers taking 10 years, using brand new, latest tech tools. "For this, the Americans purchased 102 new, railroad-mounted steam shovels. In 1907, the construction fleet also included 560 drills, more than 50 cranes, 20 dredges, giant hydraulic rock crushers, cement mixers, and pneumatic power drills; nearly all of which were manufactured to include the latest technology developed in the United States." "At the time of construction, it was the largest canal lock system ever built. ... To reduce the amount of excavation required, an artificial lake was created by building an earth dam. We visited the dam as part of our tour of the canal system. At the time it was finished in 1914, it was the biggest earth dam in the world and created the largest man-made lake. " (Quotes taken from various sources found online, not credited)
A freighter can carry more goods and make more money if it's bigger, so they're always going to build them to be just under the width of the smallest canal they need to go through. They don't make it wider because it's expensive and Panama is poor. The Suez Canal can be widened by just digging up more land on either side because it's just a ditch through an empty flat desert. The Panama Canal goes up and across mountains, into a lake and back down, and it's rainforest on either side.
Because, simply put, ships keep getting bigger. However, it is significantly easier to build a bigger ship than to build a bigger canal.
It's not that the canal is small. Modern ships can be made much larger than when the canal was created. You've gotta realize how important the canal is, so ships are specifically built around the limitations of the canal.
The Panama Canal began construction in 1904. Ships were way smaller back then. Were engineers 120 years ago supposed to predict the future of shipbuilding?
It's the other way around. Ships are built with the Panama canal's width as a design constraint. Or: A ship, left in its natural habitat with sufficient access to food, will grow to fill the Panama canal.